To-Do List: Isaac Downgraded; Bain’s Bailout

To know: Isaac has been downgraded to a tropical storm, though massive flooding still persists in New Orleans after a levee was breached … At a conference in Tehran, Mohammed Morsi, the new Egyptian President, said that the Assad regime in Syria has lost all its legitimacy … Former Governor Mike Huckabee voiced his support of Todd Akin to hundreds of Southern Baptists, calling him a “solution” to groups like Planned Parenthood … Barclays announced Antony Jenkins as its new C.E.O., replacing Bob Diamond, who resigned after Barclays’ admission that it attempted to tamper with LIBOR … An Institute of Aging study that began in 1987 reveals that calorie restriction and starvation diets do nothing to increase longevity in humans.

To read: Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone writes about the federal bailout that used to keep Bain afloat:

According to the candidate’s mythology, Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began. When The Boston Globe reported on the rescue at the time of his Senate run against Ted Kennedy, campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a “long-shot miracle,” bragging that he had “saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company.”

In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney’s initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster—leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had “no value as a going concern.” Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC—the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers—out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds….

But the FDIC documents on the Bain deal—which were heavily redacted by the firm prior to release—show that as a wealthy businessman, Romney was willing to go to extremes to secure a federal bailout to serve his own interests. He had a lot at stake, both financially and politically. Had Bain & Company collapsed, insiders say, it would have dealt a grave setback to Bain Capital, where Romney went on to build a personal fortune valued at as much as $250 million. It would also have short-circuited his political career before it began, tagging Romney as a failed businessman unable to rescue his own firm.

“None of us wanted to see Bain be the laughingstock of the business world,” recalls a longtime Romney lieutenant who asked not to be identified. “But Mitt’s reputation was on the line.”

It was early in my tenure as an investigator at the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, the city agency established in 1993 to investigate allegations of misconduct against NYPD officers. The case was a fairly straightforward stop-and-frisk incident near the massive New York City Housing Authority complexes along Avenue D in Manhattan. The complainant, a man in his early 20s, alleged that a plainclothes cop had stopped, frisked, and searched him after he stepped out of a bodega. He’d given a guy a cigarette, and before he knew it, the cop came up from behind him, grabbed him by the coat, and after a quick scuffle, pushed him against a wall.

I’d already interviewed the cop’s unusually forthcoming partner, whose testimony matched the complainant’s. That’s how I knew the cop was making stuff up. Lots of stuff.

The experience was exhilarating: Not every 22-year-old has a chance to interrogate an armed member of the country’s largest police force. But there I was. And this cop had not only illegally stopped, frisked, and searched a citizen but had also lied about it, and I suddenly found myself in a position to hold him accountable.

I closed the case as “substantiated,” meaning the complaint was legitimate. The Board handed the case over to the police department with a recommendation of disciplinary measures. But within a few months, the police department had dismissed the case. As usual, they did not explain why. From then on, being lied to by police officers became so common that the excitement—of not only catching them in the act but making an official record of it—gave way to anesthetized indifference. I would see many legitimate complaints fall by the wayside, ignored by the police department or lost in the CCRB’s bureaucratic labyrinth.

To watch: Clips from Paul Ryan’s R.N.C. speech last night:

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